Labor’s election review reads like a disaster movie – with a few clues for the stunned survivors

The forward sizzle about the release of Labor’s campaign review was focused on the obvious conflict point – how Bill Shorten would absorb the post-mortem. Would the review be scathing about the former leader’s lack of popularity, attributing the lion’s share of the blame for the election loss to him? Would Shorten then strike back, setting the framework for a contested term, and another election loss?

The reviewers met with Shorten privately early on Thursday, before the review went to the national executive, so the former leader was briefed ahead of the public unveiling. Shorten then responded publicly to the review before it was released, framing it on his own terms, and his own terms were clear as a bell. In the world of second chances, “were the universe to grant re-runs” the former leader would do things differently and, by the way, he’d be around for the next 20 years.

So that bit of deft media management from Shorten – I’m learning guys, and by the way I’m still here – delivered the requisite personality frisson that the busted, over-stimulated, 24/7 news cycle craves.

Still, it wasn’t just cheap spectacle. Shorten’s indefatigability is a practical issue for Anthony Albanese to manage, as recent history tells us. Former leaders who believe their best days are still in front of them are always oversized.

But consuming the review through the prism of personality, and ego, and leadership ambition, would be a mistake. Critics inside Labor on Thursday were focusing on the deficiencies of the post-mortem: the implicit elevation of popularity as a make-or-break metric (Malcolm Turnbull might have something to say about whether doing that is a good idea), and the failure to provide some serious analysis about which policies were successful and which were dogs.

These critiques doing the rounds are reasonable. But my own view is the 2019 campaign review is a substantial bit of work, which takes the challenge squarely up to Labor on a range of fronts.

The review is completely unsparing about the campaign, which reads like a disaster movie. Lurking behind the Hindenburg were organisational processes within the opposition that didn’t allow sufficient internal contestability, which leads us to some observations about culture: the reviewers note that people were not encouraged to express their doubts about whether or not Labor was really tracking to victory – doubts that clearly should have been expressed.

But the most challenging question of the post-mortem is not whether or not one campaign was a monumental stuff up, or whether Stockholm syndrome had taken hold, whether the polling was noisy, whether voters hated Shorten, whether there was a campaign committee, or whether people made up spending proposals on the back of shopping dockets during the campaign.

The central question of the review is how does Labor fuse its increasingly divided core constituencies – those constituencies being blue-collar workers and affluent metropolitan progressives?

Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson are pretty blunt about that challenge. “Success in resolving this dilemma will first require Labor to acknowledge it exists. It will require Labor to devote the necessary time and energy as a party to address it.”

There is no definitive roadmap from the reviewers, but a couple of dangerous ideas are floated.

The first is decentralisation. Labor federally is run by a leadership group, a shadow expenditure review committee and a shadow ministry, which works on a principle of drawing civil society organisations and progressive constituencies closer to Labor, the reviewers note, in an environment where a growing list of these groups had already “banked the win” in 2019.

The inference from the reviewers is these procedures, meant to impose discipline on the animal spirits of a political party that threw away government by indulging an unhinged leadership soap opera between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, imprisoned Labor in an activist frame.

To solve the dilemma identified, Labor has to step outside the closed loop of Australians who are politically engaged. “Success is likely to require a campaign culture that is less centralised and encourages a greater diversity of views and more robust internal debates – to reflect the increasing diversity of Labor’s constituency from inner-city voters to those living in outer-urban, regional and country communities,” the review says.

Simple, right? Until you compare that aspiration with current reality. The party which has spent decades building up a command and control structure and centralised national decision making – with that organisational structure considered an institutional strength – now needs to think about loosening the grip. “A stronger regional presence is essential for Labor to be in touch with voter concerns and issues in Australia’s regions.”

Implicit in this review is a challenge: Labor in 2019 needs to learn how to walk all sides of the street.

There is a view doing the rounds in the right faction post-election that progressive, values-driven voters are less important than the traditional base, because they can vote Green and the preferences flow back – but the campaign review is emphatic on this point: one constituency can’t be sacrificed for another.

Fusing constituencies with different experiences, values and objectives in an age of mass intolerance is really bloody difficult, but this, in a nutshell, is the core challenge of the current term.

Weatherill and Emerson are crystal clear: if Labor can’t do this, if it fails to square this circle, it will not win the next election.